YouthLab: Green Shoots is a collaborative and experimental project developed as part of the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art’s YouthLab programme. The project ran from December 2020 to March 2021 and has grown out of an earlier project, Greening the City, that was suspended in March 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak. It explored how we can use collaborative action to enact change in our local neighbourhood, moving towards more sustainable practices and raising awareness of environmental issue.
Working remotely, Green Shoots was designed to re-engage with these questions, whilst being a response to the needs of young creatives based in Greater Manchester, and providing a social and supportive framework for tackling some of the personal and social implications of the Covid-19 crisis. Working with a group of 6 young creatives recruited through an open call, we have explored the question: What Next for our City? This question has generated responses that range from personal explorations of lockdown and of Manchester, to wider questions of how we relate to the planet on a local, national and global scale.
We wanted to create a project that would allow the participants to work collaboratively and support each other through an uncertain time. This publication seeks to represent the project, and show how we were able to work together whilst being apart. None of the participants have met in person, yet throughout the project there have been supportive conversations and fruitful discussions and many common threads. This publication seeks to weave those threads into something collective, and to document this time.
Read the full brochure here